How we calculate

The method behind every chart on SaralKundli, in plain words.

The zodiac we use

We use the sidereal zodiac, the one Indian astrology has always used: the twelve signs are fixed against the stars, not the seasons. Western sun-sign columns use the tropical zodiac, which starts Aries at the March equinox.

The Earth’s axis slowly wobbles, about one degree every 72 years, so the two zodiacs have drifted apart. The gap between them is the ayanamsa, definition. We use the Lahiri value, the one India’s Calendar Reform Committee adopted in the 1950s, and today it is about 24°.

That is why your Sun sign here is often one sign earlier than in a Western horoscope. A Sun at 10° Leo in a Western chart sits at about 16° Cancer here. Neither chart is broken; they count from different starting points.

Planet positions come from the Swiss Ephemeris, the standard astronomical tables, with Rahu and Ketu at their mean positions.

How we count the houses

Your rising sign, the lagna, definition, is the sign coming up on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born. We use whole-sign houses: that whole sign is your 1st house, the next sign your 2nd, and so on. Each bhava, definition is one complete sign, which is how the North Indian chart on the Chart tab is drawn.

There is a second way to divide the sky, the Sripati bhava chalit. It measures houses from the exact degree of the lagna, so a house can begin partway through a sign. We show it separately on the Chart tab, under “Bhava chalit (Sripati)”.

The two can disagree for a planet near a house edge. Say your lagna is at 25° Leo and Mercury at 3° Leo. In whole-sign houses Mercury is in your 1st house, because it shares the rising sign. In the chalit the 1st house often begins about 15° before the lagna degree, so Mercury can land in the 12th. Our readings use whole-sign houses; the chalit is there to compare.

The clock behind your birth time

Enter the birth time exactly as the record shows it, in the local clock time of the birthplace. We read it through the published time-zone history for that place, so the offset in force on that date is applied for you. For India that means Indian Standard Time from 1906, plus the wartime clock, an hour ahead, for most of October 1941 to October 1945. A certificate time needs no manual correction.

What the zone history does not cover: Kolkata kept its own city time until 1948 and Mumbai until 1955, and before 1906 the history uses Madras time for all of India. If a record from those cities and years was written in city time, it runs about 23 minutes ahead of IST in Kolkata and 39 minutes behind in Mumbai; convert it before you enter it.

Precision matters most for the lagna. The rising degree moves about one degree every four minutes, so a time rounded to the nearest five minutes can shift the lagna by about 1.25°. Usually that changes nothing you would see. When the lagna sits within 1° of a sign’s edge, the reading says so and names the neighbouring sign, because a few minutes either way would change the rising sign and every house with it.

What a computer can and cannot know

A computer is good at exactly the part that is arithmetic. It places every planet to a fraction of a degree, finds the Moon’s nakshatra, definition and its quarter, counts the periods to the day, and applies every rule the same way to every chart, with no mood and no memory of the last person.

It cannot know what has happened in your life, what you intend, or whether the time on your certificate was rounded by whoever wrote it. It sees positions, not events. When a result depends on something we cannot check, we say so instead of guessing.

Our readings are traditional interpretation of those positions, written in plain words. They are not statements of fact about your future, and we sell no remedies: no stones, no pujas, no paid fixes.